The Romans imported cotton fabrics from India, and the priests of ancient Egypt used it for their dresses.
The cotton plant was cultivated by the Moors in Spain about the beginning of the tenth century, and they were the first people in Europe to make cotton fabrics. They are also credited with the invention of fustian-making (Spanish, fustes), a cotton material woven and afterwards cut precisely like velvet; it is generally thought that as fustian preceded the manufacture of velvet, the making of the latter may have been suggested to the Italians by the Spanish fustian.
In the year 1585, after the sacking of Antwerp, some Flemish weavers settled at Manchester—now the great seat of cotton manufacture in England—and commenced the new industry of cotton spinning and weaving. Before this date Manchester and its neighbourhood were noted for the weaving of linen. The linen yarn was imported from Ireland, woven at Manchester, and the cloth sent back for distribution and sale in Ireland and other parts of the kingdom.
The power of production in cotton goods was enormously increased by the inventions of Arkwright with his water-frame spinning machine, Hargreaves, who in 1770 invented the spinning-jenny, and by Compton, who improved on the latter by his invention of the mule-jenny in 1779.
In 1785 Dr. Cartwright invented an automatic loom, which others improved on, when finally Horrocks, of Stockport, in 1803 brought to a successful issue his invention of the power-loom now in general use.
Cotton printing and dyeing in colours have been successfully practised in India, Asia Minor, the Levant, and in the East generally from the earliest times. The patterns found in the commoner prints and chintzes of to-day have still reminiscences of Indian and Persian ornament.
Most of the English designs in cotton prints of the more important classes have a strong tendency to floral patterns of a naturalistic type, the outcome of the imitation of French silk patterns that were common in the early part of this century.
Calico block-printing was introduced into England about the middle of the eighteenth century by Robert Peel—the grandfather of the first baronet—who cut his own blocks. Printing by means of cylinders was invented in 1785. Previous to the invention of calico printing “painted cloths” of linen and other fabrics were used as hangings and in the general furnishing of English apartments.
Embroidery.
The earliest method of decorating textiles was that of embroidering. It has been called “painting with the needle,” and is even an older art than pattern weaving. In some of the oldest monuments of art that are still in existence, as the bas-reliefs of Egypt and Assyria, there may be seen representations of the embroidery that formerly decorated the kings’ garments (see Figs. 162A to 165, former volume), and we have seen that these were the models for some of the earliest woven patterns. At first embroidered patterns would be simple geometrical designs, and afterwards symbolic units mixed with simple floral forms, as many of the older Egyptian embroidered patterns usually were, until by degrees the higher forms of patterns with figures or personages and animal forms were developed by the Chaldeans and Assyrians.